Five Cooking Tips to Save Energy in the Kitchen

These days many of us are looking for ways to save money and consume fewer resources for a greener planet. Some of the ways we are taught to save energy, like using energy efficient light globes or recycling paper, seem fairly obvious but there’s still plenty more that we all could be doing.

One great way to amplify your ‘eco efforts’ is to look around the house room by room at how you can save energy.

The kitchen is probably the most energy hungry room in the house, though my office comes a close second, but how many of us have actually considered what we could possibly do to cook in a more ‘eco’ way?

So here are my five cooking tips to save energy in the kitchen, some are quite obvious but all of them will definitely help reduce your carbon footprint on the planet.

The right tool for the job
Use the right size pan or pots for the cooking job at hand, and make sure to match it to the right sized burner. It may sound silly but you can waste a lot of time and energy trying to boil a giant-size pot of potatoes on an itty bitty burner, and conversely you can waste loads of energy heating up a small pan of sauce on a giant burner. If you can see more than a 1cm of overlap, either the pan overlapping the burner or the burner overlapping the pan, then see if one of your other pots will be a better fit.

Bonus Tip – if you only have to boil three potatoes you don’t need to get out the giant 5L pot. And if you have to boil twenty potatoes, you definitely need a large pot with an appropriate amount of water, ie. just enough to cover the tops so you don’t have to spend too much time and energy warming all that water.

Don’t preheat your oven.
Have you ever been pressed for time and just shoved that tray of chocolate chip cookies, or maybe some blueberry muffins, in an oven that hasn’t been preheated? What happened? Apart from having to add a minute or two to the cooking time, it certainly didn’t add ten minutes to the cooking time or completely wreck your cookies did it? With many ovens it takes around 10-15 minutes to warm up to 180 degrees, and that’s wasted energy, and wasted time. So don’t stand around waiting for the oven to pre-heat, just get your cookies in there and get ready to enjoy!

Bigger isn’t always better
If you’re making an open-faced sandwich, warming up some leftovers, or eating those frozen and ready-to-cook cookies, then skip the oven and try using your toaster oven instead. Why? It uses significantly less energy to heat up, and quite often it is actually faster. Additionally, your microwave can be used to steam, reheat and even to make eggs, melt chocolate and warm up canned meals in much less time and with much less energy, just be sure not to actually put the can from your canned meal in the microwave, that’d be silly.

Slower can definitely be better
When you are making soups, stews, or even a good old Sunday roast, consider using a slow cooker instead of cooking them for hours upon hours on top of the stove. Slow cookers use less energy and you can cook your meals during low energy times in your home. For example, if you’re using the air-con during the day and also cooking, you’ll actually make your a/c work harder because your cooking will add heat to the home. However, if you can cook your roast overnight when you’re a/c isn’t running then you’re saving energy.

Take the pressure down
Grab your Grandmother’s pressure cooker and embrace it for its amazing power to cook foods in a tenth of the time. However, if your Grandmother’s old pressure cooker scares the heck out of you, and no one would blame you for that, modern pressure cookers are definitely safer and easier to work with.

You can save a tremendous amount of energy focusing your attentions and habits on one room at a time. And what better place to start than in the kitchen, the core of your home and probably your biggest user of energy.

Can you think of any other energy saving tips, why not share them with us in the comments below?

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